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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

To make a bootable USB disk with the Mac OS X installer, the guides I found are much too verbose for my taste, and have too many cute screenshots and ads. Here is a summary for the impatient.

For Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra

There is a handy "createinstallmedia" command.

The only difficulty is getting the installer, which must be downloaded from the App store. If you need an older installer than the current version, the only way seems to be to find it in the "purchased" page.

Other instructions suggest using the InstallESD.dmg file as the source, and the USB key itself (not the partition it contains) as the destination. That may work too. Just don't mix both methods. I had tried that and failed, but maybe it was because I had first made a GPT partition table instead of MBR?

If you only have a 4GB key, it seems to work using Carbon Copy Cloner and de-selecting all unneeded language packs. But I haven't tried an install from such a key.

Sunday, June 03, 2012

Update: Over 2 years later (August 2014), I still come across this problem. This time, the error code was 0x8004ff19, but the solution was the same: delete "%PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Security Client" and re-install with the current installer.

It seems that there is a pretty bad problem with Microsoft Security Essentials. I was surprised to notice that it wasn't running on several machines. It turns out that an automatic upgrade through Windows Update fails in a very bad way: it sort of uninstalls the old version, and then fails to install the new version. Users don't notice anything special.

Trying to re-install it by hand also fails with a very informative message (as usual for MS error messages):

Log Name: Application
Source: SideBySide
Event ID: 72
Description: Activation context generation failed for "c:\program files\microsoft security client\MSESysprep.dll".Error in manifest or policy file "c:\program files\microsoft security client\MSESysprep.dll" on line 10. The element imaging appears as a child of element urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1^assembly which is not supported by this version of Windows.

Advice found on the web which didn't work:

Uninstall MSSE then re-install (it was not listed in the installed programs, so I couldn't uninstall it)

Uninstall any other anti virus software (I didn't have any)

Run OneCareCleanup (silly because it was never installed)

etc.

Anyway, after a lot of useless searching and trying, what worked for me was to simply rmdir /S /Q "%PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Security Client"

But it is very disturbing to see that an antivirus can just stop working without any obvious alert or user notification.

PS: It turns out that even Mark Russinovich had a problem with MSSE. His immediate error was different, but was one I also eventually found in the logs. His solution was to delete the HKCR\Installer\UpgradeCodes\11BB99F8B7FD53D4398442FBBAEF050F registry key. I had tried his procmon tool to try to find what returned "access denied", but then decided to resort to some primitive and brutal approaches first...